Coveraging of aWireless Sensor Network

Coverage is an essential problem in wireless sensor networks. It is important
to ensure that sensors provide sufficient coverage of the sensing field.
However, one should use as few sensors as possible to cover the sensing
field to reduce the hardware cost. Assuming that sensors are randomly
deployed, this section discusses three general models to define the coverage
problem and reviews some solutions to the coverage problem. The
first one is the binary model, where each sensor’s coverage area is modeled
by a disk. Any location within the disk is well monitored by the
sensor located at the center of the disk; otherwise, it is not monitored
by the sensor. The second one is the probabilistic model. An event happening
in the coverage of a sensor is either detected or not detected by the
sensor depending on a probability distribution. Hence, even if an event
is very close to a sensor, it may still be missed by the sensor. The last
model considers the coverage problem by including the issue of how targets
travel along the sensing field. The worst and best traveling paths of
this model can be used to evaluate the sensing capability of the sensor
network.

Reference:Wireless Ad Hoc Networking by Shih-Lin Wu & Yu-Chee Tseng